The rise in coronavirus activity that worried some public officials last month has “leveled off” in Boston but the city is still scrutinizing data for signs of shifts in the pandemic, Mayor Martin Walsh said Tuesday afternoon.
Speaking outside of City Hall, Walsh said that the “uptick that we saw in the second half of July has leveled off.” He said the city has maintained at least 20 testing sites and continues to make testing more accessible.
“We’re expanding testing and continuing contact tracing. The positive test rate for the week ending August 10 was 2.6 percent, that’s down from the previous week of 2.8 percent. Visits to Boston emergency rooms for COVID-like illnesses are down somewhat and stable over time,” the mayor said. Intensive care unit “usage in Boston at Boston hospitals are down to 74 percent from 82 percent, but our daily average positive test stayed up around 40 cases.”
The number of tests conducted in Boston is up in every neighborhood except Allston/Brighton, Walsh said, though he noted that there was recently a pop-up testing site in the area and the city is working to get the results from those tests.
Walsh said that the last full week of data showed the city conducted more than 1,600 tests daily, which he said was up 8.6 percent from the previous week.
As of Tuesday, Walsh said there have been 14,940 cases of COVID-19 in Boston and 746 people in the city have died with the virus. The mayor said the city had 24 new cases reported Tuesday and no new deaths to announce. “Thank God,” he said.
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